


Galileo's Telescope

by paperiuni



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Astronomy, Backstory, Getting to Know Each Other, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Romance, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-17 12:39:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13659174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: One night on the roof, Magnus and Alec share a few secrets, ponder old and new connections, and fall in love a little more.(Set after episode 2x10.)





	Galileo's Telescope

**Author's Note:**

> 1) This story contains spoilers up to episode 2x10 and mentions a canonical character death.  
> 2) I'm still writing in the slight AU where some downtime exists between episodes, because the show's pacing is hilarious and its timeline possibly in knots.

*

One reason Magnus had made his lair in the loft in Brooklyn Heights had been the rooftop that came with it. He enjoyed the view, and the vantage had benefits beyond the aesthetic. Warlocks rarely claimed territories or jurisdictions; he never fancied himself as ruling over the city laid out below. But perhaps, like a cat, he'd sought out the solace and sanctity of a high lookout point.

It wasn't a solitary hideaway as such. Anyone that Magnus welcomed into his home might find their way up the spiral staircase, to lounge in the comfortable chairs, or take in the lights of the waterfront or the greens of his herb garden. In the weeks since Valentine had been captured, at the cost of dozens of Downworlder lives, it'd served as a haven for many worn-out friends, but also as the stage of several heated arguments over the uncertain future of New York's Shadow World societies.

Tonight, all told, Magnus was glad to have only one companion on the roof.

He came back up to find that Alec had left the couch to sprawl on his back on the bare concrete behind it. An evening downpour had scoured the worst August dust out of the air, and night had come unusually clear. Magnus set down the book he'd ducked inside to find. Alec had dimmed his reading lamp on the table to a muted, soft glow.

"There's any number of questions I could open with." Magnus leaned over the back of the couch.

"I thought I saw Saturn." The swirled cross of a vision rune shone on the back of Alec's hand, freshly drawn, as he tracked a point in the hazy vault of the sky. Elusive as most celestial objects were in the city, with its ever-present light pollution, the roof did offer a decent spot for stargazing. "Yeah. There."

"I didn't know you dabbled in astronomy." Magnus didn't even try to see precisely what Alec was indicating. He was more fascinated by the broader epiphany here. Alec presented a front of such austere interests—duty, honor, family, a smattering of archery because, presumably, martial skills were a permissible pastime—that it still thrilled Magnus to be granted glimpses under that chinked facade of Shadowhunter probity. Even when he knew it wasn't the whole truth of Alec. Never had been.

"I haven't in ages, actually." Alec peered farther up. "That's probably Mars. The rune's not as good as a telescope."

"The fire star," Magnus said, musingly, then turned back to the more practical part. "Should I find you one? A telescope. A planet would be a trickier proposition."

"I've got one. Though it's stashed in my parents' attic in Idris." At Magnus's smothered sound of amazement, Alec closed his eyes. "Astronomy used to be a serious part of Shadowhunter education. You're making that face where you're shocked that my family let me have any fun ever."

"There's no such face," Magnus protested, half-hearted. "Oh, all right. I'm mildly surprised at this intrusion of intellectual wonder into your soldierly pursuits. Pleasantly surprised, at that."

Alec seemed to mull this over. The batch of cloudmint Magnus had brought from the Spiral Labyrinth gardens and painstakingly tended all summer opened its gossamer blooms in the dark. When Magnus was about to reach for his book, for the sake of letting Alec ponder, he finally spoke.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Of course. I'll even make up an entertaining falsehood if it's something I can't answer."

"Actually, let me rephrase that." Though the air remained balmy, Magnus thought of the chill of the uncovered roof under Alec's back as Alec shifted in place. "I was thinking there's a lot we don't know about each other. Stuff like, I used to sneak out with that telescope all the time, before we moved to New York."

Magnus nodded, his curiosity piqued. They did talk, over meals, in rambling chains of text messages when their responsibilities kept them apart, in bed after sex or when sleep would not come. But even Alec's twenty-odd years of memory covered a lot of ground, not to speak of his own swaths of half-forgotten history.

"Maybe we can make it a thing. Ask a question, we both answer it. We'll take turns asking, I mean."

"Without any diverting lies, I assume?" An inexplicable, warm weight settled in Magnus's chest.

"The truth is sort of the point of the exercise." Alec's mouth crooked. "I'm not asking you to give up any warlock secrets."

"A veto clause for sensitive material might ruin the fun, though." Magnus looked down at him with a faint sense of disbelief underneath his amusement. _How did you end up here? What did I do to deserve you?_

"Look. You can try to embarrass _me_ all you want. That good enough?"

"Perfectly."

As if to seal the matter, Alec made a beckoning motion. To his own slight bafflement, Magnus took a throw pillow and the mostly decorative merino wool blanket draped over the armrest, and settled next to Alec on the roof.

"You can start," he said, because Alec was unlikely to play dirty right off the bat, and he needed a moment to process these implications.

Alec didn't try to inch onto the blanket, but tucked the pillow under his head and flung out an arm. This struck Magnus as a reasonable compromise. If one was going to lie on a rooftop under the barely visible stars, one might as well put his head on his boyfriend's shoulder.

"Okay. Uh, favorite planet? Since we're on the topic."

Magnus thought for a bit. "Jupiter, maybe, if we discount all the fanciful-sounding exoplanets. Is that too cliché an answer? It is rather stunning. The colors of the cloud bands. When you've looked at it all the way from Galileo's telescope to the images probes can get today—"

"You did _not_ know Galileo. I'm calling bullshit." Alec didn't sound particularly bothered. Laughter hid right under his bluster.

"Truth was the point of the exercise, Alexander," Magnus said serenely. "I never got to meet the man himself."

"Fine. I'm gonna ask for that story another time." Alec flexed his fingers. "Saturn for me. I guess it's the rings. I—I don't think I've ever told anybody this, but I used to picture seeing them up close. Going walking there, in the silence, just this huge, endless expanse of ice in the dark. I don't know. That's stupid."

Magnus clasped Alec's hand, bringing it firmly to his shoulder. "It's the furthest thing from stupid. It makes me wish it were possible to portal to outer space."

The sigh that Alec let out seemed to carry the most of his fretfulness with it. He relaxed, folding his fingers between Magnus's, tilting closer to him. "Your turn."

"Hmm. Somewhere you want to go that we actually could?" Magnus might've asked this because Alec's vision made his heart ache, in an odd melange of longing and sympathy. If Alec had lived a life so devoid of marvels as it appeared at first glance, would he have taken the step that'd plunged him off the path charted for him? Could he have imagined the possibility?

 _Crater Lake_ , Alec said then in reply, and let Magnus tick off three locations—Angkor Wat, Lake Magadi in Kenya, and a twilit café in the Old Town of Riga that served a heavenly cherry strudel—on his bucket list of places he wanted to show Alec in turn.

They bandied questions back and forth for a bit: lighter points of interest, returns to earlier offhand comments that'd spurred wonderment, even a practical notion or two. A filmy cover of cloud began to form over the sky as the time crept toward midnight. Brooklyn lulled itself into a fitful quiet.

Upon a crash of creativity, Magnus resorted to _favorite color_ and was delighted to hear Alec's answer wasn't _black_. He allowed Alec to ask if he knew about any half-siblings he might have—he didn't, but the question lingered as a heaviness in his throat. This exception did give him a unilateral question in return, though.

When he turned over his immediate idea, it sounded like a piece of vanity even in his own head. If he adhered to their mutual decision that the past was the past, and it was the now that mattered, why would he ask this?

"Spit it out," Alec murmured, his tone remarkably gentler than the phrasing. "I can hear you thinking."

It was such a casual, familiar thing to say that it brought Magnus short. Much had changed in the brief, dizzying time they'd been together. He still watched Alec in the process of breaking out of his shell, of shedding lifelong cautions and defenses. The word _love_ had been spoken and it fit; he couldn't argue that. He did love this brusque, forthright, high-hearted young man, who'd seen in Magnus a choice he never knew he had and taken it.

What was a little unwise curiosity weighed against that?

"At the wedding—" He folded his hands over his stomach. "Was that your first kiss?" _Was_ I _your first?_

Alec gave an inarticulate noise, tension clenching in his body. "Why?"

"I'm the last person in this or the seven nearest realms to give you grief over that." There was a drop of sanctimony in that, but it was a very small drop. Magnus softened his voice, anyway. "It was an honest question."

"Sorry. Old habit." Alec dragged his free hand over his face. "Though if you're leading up to some confession about how it was bad, just get it over with."

"No, I'm not," Magnus said. "How about a slight benefit of the doubt, here?"

Neither of them, he thought, was used to such candid exchanges. Even Alec's painfully blunt nature only meant that he had one method of protecting his secrets: burying them behind doorless walls to never be brought into light. Magnus himself would always reach for guile and tactful omission, a veneer of banter to deflect inquiry he thought too personal.

"It wasn't my first kiss," Alec said, breaking the silence. "There was this Seelie party in Central Park. Three years ago. Before you ask why I was there—Izzy and Jace happened."

 _Don't think I won't ply you for every detail of this fascinating episode later_ , Magnus carefully did not say. The delicate warding he'd strung over the roof to make the weather roll off it seemed to be unraveling in one corner. He noted this, too, and filed it away. "If you can't beat them, join them?"

"Something like that. If I hadn't gone along, they would've come home in the morning stinking of cheap moonwine and Izzy would've—uh, there was an incident with a rose bush one time. I'm sworn to secrecy."

"I wouldn't dream of violating your brother-sister confidentiality."

To his relief, Alec chortled at that. "It was like you'd picture it. Glamoured lawn, drunk Seelies everywhere, some other Downworlders too, fires that smelled like, I don't know, cut grass, flowers. I lost sight of Izzy like ten minutes in and it took me an hour to find her. Jace was off doing his thing." A dash of unease shaded Alec's tone, but he went on, "Some people would side-eye me, because of the runes, but others..."

Magnus thought he knew what Alec was getting at. He held his peace. Sometimes lending someone the words to express themselves was helpful, but Alec already knew what he wanted to say. The understanding was past; it was the sharing that was new.

"Some of them just looked at me. Like they wanted to pay attention. Like I saw people look at Izzy. I mean, she loved it, it made her shine."

"There is a thrill to it. To being seen with admiration, even the aesthetic kind." Magnus had learned this early and applied the lesson often, though the ability to distinguish between various strains of appreciation had proved just as crucial.

"Before I get any more lost..." Alec twisted so that Magnus saw it wiser roll over onto his stomach before Alec jostled his head off his shoulder. "There was a Seelie. Laughing, blue feathers in his hair. He came up to me, and maybe I'd breathed too deep of one of those bonfires because I didn't even blink."

He watched the sky, pupils wide in the twilight pooled on the roof. "I never went to a Downworlder party again. Until the one where you and I met, I guess. But he kissed me, like we weren't in the middle of a hundred people, and—I don't even remember his face. I just remember that kiss."

The focus with which Alec kept his gaze up was a gentle warning not to come in its line. The fingers of his right hand curled and uncurled, as if grasping at the edge of something unseen. "Is that weird? That I'm telling you I never forgot how I kissed some other guy?"

"I'm glad," Magnus said. However Alec regarded the memory, Magnus felt a perilous sense of contentment over it. "That you told me. I don't care if there was someone before me or not, but I..."

"But you want to know what happened to me before you."

"Yeah." Alec's ability to distill convoluted truths into simple statements could still bemuse Magnus. "I want to know who mattered to you, even if it was for the space of one kiss. Our histories make us who we are. I can't hope to know you without it."

"Okay," Alec said, like he did when he needed to let something ruminate but was committing himself to the trouble. "One more question?"

"One more." Magnus should probably brace himself for some plumbing of his private thoughts in return. Certainly he'd been curious. When they'd last discussed their romantic pasts, the topic had turned choppy, and he'd wanted to see if the straits were calmer now. Apparently not yet smooth, but navigable.

"Last one then." Alec drew a breath. "Most important person?"

Oh, Alec had been leading up to this. It'd even been subtle.

"Asker goes first," Magnus said, as if it were an established rule. He sat up, crossing his ankles, so he faced Alec. His heart quickened under his ribs for no good reason.

"Right." Alec paused. "We both answer now."

"You wanted to ask something I already knew your answer to. We had one turn of exceptions."

"No, I'm—it's all good." Maybe not so subtle, after all. Alec's confusion was inconveniently endearing. "I just can't answer with only one person."

"Were you expecting that _I_ could?" If anything, Magnus had thought Alec might be able to. He was the one who'd bound himself to a sworn companion, by choice and by seraphic magic. He was young enough to live chiefly by conviction.

Taking that for a rhetorical comment, Alec said, "Jace and Izzy. I love Max, I love my parents—despite everything—but it's like, we were always a triumvirate." Magnus had to laugh, his throat tight, at this uncharacteristic choice of term. "If there's anybody in the world that knows me, it's them."

This held no mystery for Alec, no conflict or condition. What could one do but be humbled by the honesty with which he loved? Not only loved, either: his two siblings were the ones that he leaned on and fought for, that he trusted and was, quite clearly, most at home around.

"I hope they know they're lucky to have you, Alexander."

"Well," Alec said, wry, "they're my brother and sister. We're hideous to each other most of the time."

"My dearest friend and I would communicate mainly in insults," Magnus said, the raw stroke of grief in his voice most likely audible. A few months were a paltry span to mourn a man he'd known for centuries. "It's not a matter of love, but of comfort. Though those two should go together."

Alec hitched himself up, leaned back on one hand. "On second thought, maybe that was a seriously stupid question right now."

"What, because of Ragnor? Because I was too overcome with his loss to talk about what a pain in the neck he was? That'd please him." Laughter was, Magnus reminded himself, the best remedy for tears, and the less reverent the better. "He would count as an answer. Of course, I can't mention him without bringing up Cat in the same breath."

"And you guys used to be a triumvirate, too?" Alec offered.

"We still are. Only two of us being corporeal is a minor setback."

"Good memories go a long way, hm?"

"They help," Magnus said, a little stymied as to how to eloquently explain to Alec the loss of someone who'd been with you for four generous human lifetimes. A recognition of death came with the business of shadowhunting. Alec had seen comrades-in-arms fall in the line of their angel-dictated calling, and would again.

But to know another so well you could run hours of conversations in your head without their being present; to have stack upon stack of shared secrets and joys and miseries; to meet after a decade apart and be as if you'd seen each other yesterday? Only time could give you that.

"Will you let me meet her some time? Catarina?" Alec spoke quietly, but a hopeful spark glittered in his eye.

"'Let you'," Magnus echoed. "You missed her by about an hour today. Which is to say, of course I'll introduce you. I... would like to, in fact."

It said something about the swerving course of their recent weeks that the thought hadn't already occurred to him. With Catarina, they got too easily mazed in affairs arcane or political, and Madzie's entry into her life claimed much of her time. And with Alec—they tried to keep the politics to a minimum during their free hours, but Alec was, in general, apt at distracting Magnus.

"Sounds good to me."

"She is a formidable woman, but I don't see that thwarting you."

"I may know a few others who fit that description." Alec nudged his nose with a knuckle to conceal a smile; Magnus felt the sight tug at the corner of his own mouth.

"Does this satisfy, then?" He stretched a leg out idly. "I could add several people to the list. I'm afraid you wouldn't be able to meet most of them."

"That question is kind of a trap," Alec said. "You know—have known—a lot more people than me, and even I couldn't narrow it down to one."

"Oh, we've moved on to critique of the game. Do we need another round some other night, so you can refine the system?" The blithe remark came to him unbidden. They'd returned, without warning, to the part that'd pricked at his heart.

"Magnus," Alec said. His name only. It had a sound on his lips that felt both foreign and soothing.

"Yes?"

"I think I want you to make it to my list."

Breathing out, a rasp of air, Magnus wound a hand behind Alec's head. Alec braced himself on both arms as Magnus kissed him. It was an intent kiss, ardent and unhurried. It was the best reply he could give, encompassing the same soft, unspoken things as Alec's admission.

_I want time with you. I want to know all your stories. I want you to stay._

A moment passed before the kiss petered out. Alec gave Magnus a look of pleased puzzlement.

"Will you come back to the couch?" As Alec nodded, Magnus helped him needlessly onto his feet, relishing Alec permitting it as much as the tangible effort of it. "I think I owe you a story. Maybe the one where Catarina, Ragnor and I found ourselves in possession of Galileo's telescope?"

Alec laughed, free and incredulous, and followed him.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: [poemsfromthealley](https://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com)


End file.
